Advocacy
- How Boarding Schools Tried to ‘Kill the Indian’ Through Assimilation Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.
- The National Native American Boarding School Healing CoalitionWebsite: Our Mission: To lead in the pursuit of understanding and addressing the ongoing trauma created by the U.S. Indian Boarding School policy.
June 2021 U.S. Department of the Interior Press Release
Secretary Haaland Announces Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative
Outlines Path Forward on Troubled Legacy of Federal Boarding School Policies in Remarks to National Congress of American Indians
Investigative Journalism
Washington Post
Opinion: Deb Haaland: My grandparents were stolen from their families as children. We must learn about this history
The New York Times
Lost Lives, Lost Culture: The Forgotten History of Indigenous Boarding Schools
Uncovering the Painful History of Residential Boarding Schools
- 7/9/2001 Federal Investigation Seeks to Uncover the Painful History of Native American Boarding Schools ..."Once there, they had to hand over their belongings, put on uniforms, cut off their braids, adopt new names and abandon their languages and cultural practices."
- The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, Carlisle Repatriation In May 2016 the Northern Arapaho and the Sicangu Lakota met with Army representatives to discuss the repatriation of their children buried at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School cemetery. The Army agreed to voluntarily send these children home and pay for their exhumation, transport, and internment. Thus began the first boarding school repatriation effort in U.S. history that we know of.
Books
Boarding School Seasons by
Boarding School Seasons offers a revealing look at the strong emotional history of Indian boarding school experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. At the heart of this book are the hundreds of letters written by parents, children, and school officials at Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau School in South Dakota. These revealing letters show how profoundly entire families were affected by their experiences. Children, who often attended schools at great distances from their communities, suffered from homesickness, and their parents from loneliness. Parents worried continually about the emotional and physical health and the academic progress of their children. Families clashed repeatedly with school officials over rampant illnesses and deplorable living conditions and devised strategies to circumvent severely limiting visitation rules. Family intimacy was threatened by the school's suppression of traditional languages and Native cultural practices. Although boarding schools were a threat to family life, profound changes occurred in the boarding school experiences as families turned to these institutions for relief during the Depression, when poverty and the loss of traditional seasonal economics proved a greater threat. Boarding School Seasons provides a multifaceted look at the aspirations and struggles of real people. Brenda J. Child is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.
Call Number: E99.C6 C45Publication Date: 1998
Education for Extinction, 1875-1928 by
The last “Indian War” was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of “savagism” gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: “Kill the Indian and save the man.” The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically.
Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers.
Call Number: E97.5 .A35Publication Date: 2020
Haskell Institute by
Dr. Theresa Milk's HASKELL INSTITUTE: 19th CENTURY STORIES OF SACRIFICE AND SURVIVAL presents American Indian/Alaskan Native student stories from early days of Haskell, a federal boarding school founded in 1884. Milk takes a balanced look at the ordeals and successes of Native students as they struggled within a military, assimilationist educational environment. Dr. Milk's new research-based on letters, newspaper articles, photographs, and government documents-emphasizes individual stories. This book draws on other researchers to give the overall background of Native boarding schools, but additionally adds texture of day-to-day life as experienced by individuals. Milk recovers lost histories. She uncovers the close ties between Haskell and the University of Kansas-Lawrence community. Early supervisors of Haskell included KU chancellor James Marvin and Lawrence resident Charles Robinson, Kansas state governor and abolitionist leader.
Call Number: RH C11262Publication Date: 2007
Voices from Haskell by
Haskell Institute of Lawrence, Kansas, first opened its doors in 1884 to twenty-two Ponca and Ottawa children, sent there to be taught Anglo-Protestant cultural values. For a century and a quarter since that time, this famous boarding school institution has challenged and touched the lives of tens of thousands of Indian students and their families representing a diverse array of tribal heritages. Voices from Haskell chronicles the formative years of this unique institution through the vivid memories and words of the students who attended.
Call Number: E97.6.H37 V83 2008Publication Date: 2008
Indian School Days by
This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury.
Call Number: E99.C6 J634 1989Publication Date: 1989
DVD at KU Libraries
- The Only Good Indian by
English, Algonquian, Cherokee languages. Set in Kansas during the early 1900s, a teenage boy from the Kickapoo tribe is taken from his family and forced to attend a boarding school for native Americans. He resists the attempt to assimilate him into white society and escapes to return to his family. A bounty hunter of Cherokee descent is hired to find and return him to the institution. Along the way, an incident spurs the bounty hunter's longtime nemesis to pursue the hunter and the teenage boy.
Call Number: DVD PN1997.2 .O5952 2009Publication Date: 2009
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Call Number: E98.P5 K56 2016Publication Date: 2021
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